Losing Clementine Read online

“Your ex-husband left you, and you’ve never resolved it. That’s why you’re pushing me away. You’re trying to reenact that with me. You’re transferring your feelings about that relationship onto this one to play them out again.”

  I felt my cheeks flame red. He’d screwed up, but, of course, it was my head that was really the problem. Nothing—nothing!—could possibly be wrong with him, the shrink who fucked his patients. I wanted to tear his guts out with my bare hands and hang him by his own intestines.

  I did the next best thing. I slipped a hand under each half-eaten pie and flipped them both across the table. The margherita grazed his left arm, leaving a blood-colored war wound of sauce on his sleeve, but the Diablo, true to its name, landed grease and all on his crotch, taking his beer with it. I was only sorry the pans were no longer searing hot. Foamy, piss-colored liquid glug-glug-glugged out across the scarred table and dripped onto the floor, and the restaurant went quiet enough to hear it.

  I knocked my chair backward on my way up and out, while Miles just sat there, clinical and calm, with pork fat soaking through his pants.

  The to-go line parted as if Moses had commanded it, and I walked through the empty space out to the street and to my car, fantasizing the whole way about turning his ass in to the medical licensing board for sexual misconduct.

  I was fastening my seat belt when I thought of Richard and missed him so much tears dampened my bottom lashes. Richard wouldn’t have done that. Why hadn’t he been the one to show up at my door?

  I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and told myself they were angry tears, so I could start the car.

  Van Nuys is one of those places where no one chooses to live or wants to go. It’s what happens when your other options are too crime-ridden to be considered. Compton, maybe. Or Watts. It’s the sort of place that makes you sigh and say, “Well, I guess it could be worse.”

  The tears had dried, but my stomach still had that tight feeling that signaled either an emotional meltdown or food poisoning. I did the opposite of reflection and concentrated hard on not concentrating on my insides. Instead, I stared out the windows and took note of everything. Jane Goodall studying the chimps.

  It was just after eight o’clock, and things were getting started along Van Nuys Boulevard. Potbellied, white-haired men sat outside with their potbellied women on folding lawn chairs. As many as could fit were crammed around tables outside the hole-in-the-wall diner that, if the sign was to be believed, specialized in pie. Classic cars in varying states of refurbishment were parked in the supermarket’s lot with their hoods up and their windows down.

  New arrivals filed past me until the line of hot rods waiting to get in started to block traffic, and an LAPD cop on a motorcycle pulled up alongside and turned on his public address system.

  “You are creating gridlock. Please move. You are creating gridlock. Please move.”

  One or two cars pulled out of the line and made their way around the block, and the cop moved on, too, apparently calling it victory enough.

  The sun was sinking, and the crowd was growing and changing. Motorcycles and choppers were showing up, some of them lined with glowing lights. The short-haired, middle-aged men were being joined by skinnier, long-haired guys in Harley vests. They brought along their women, too, one of whom stopped to light a smoke next to my window. Her hair was dyed the same flat black as a few of the scragglier cars pulling in. It matched her T-shirt, which advertised beer. She’d ripped out the sleeves and the neckline, so it drooped over one shoulder and left her arms, tattooed in full sleeves, out in the open. When she brought her ciggie up to take a puff, the red spider’s web over her elbow stretched and contracted.

  I started to wonder if my father, the accountant, had had a secret life.

  By the time the cigarette was done and my companion had moved on, the crowd was morphing a third time. A loud hiss and puff of air like something out the back of a fighter jet made me jump in my seat. A white car to my left that was longer than most yachts and piloted by a kid straight out of East L.A. rose up on its back tires like a proud jungle cat, a steady boom-boom-boom coming out of its speakers. Coming down the road from the opposite direction a smaller version done up in purple sparkles like a drag queen started bouncing up and down, its shiny wheels and thin tires threatening to pop with every impact. The white yacht rose and lowered in response.

  Wild Kingdom, I thought. Mating dance.

  Dusk was closing in fast and flirting with dark, making the underchassis lights on the cars glow bright. I got out, shoved my hands in my pockets, and headed toward the parking lot. On the way, I got hit up by a guy passing out business cards for custom paint and a woman selling coupon books for a drug recovery shelter. From the looks of her, I guessed she might need to go back soon, but everyone else gave the impression of sobriety. If they were drinking, they were keeping it hidden. It was too bad. After that dinner, I could’ve done with another beer.

  Every spot in that part of the lot was taken up by some piece of automobile love. Ninety-five percent American steel. Five percent British. Not a Japanese model in sight. Not even a bike, which were exclusively Harley or so tricked out it was impossible to know what they had once been.

  The thick-bodied Hispanic boys from East L.A. stood next to newer models with flashy paint. Flames were so ubiquitous they didn’t even count. Some hung with their boys, while others brought girlfriends and kids. The two white groups—the bikers and the old-school classic guys—mostly came in pairs and talked to other pairs of their same species. It was clear where my interests lay.

  I snaked my way through the crowd and around slow-moving cars still trying to find their spot in the parade. Every time the light at the nearby intersection changed from red to green, a thunder of engines revved, and the one or two grocery shoppers just trying to make their way to the store for onion bagels winced and reconsidered.

  I shoved my hands deeper in my pockets and cursed myself for not bringing a sweater.

  Speakers competed with one another, creating a din of sound that only turned into a song when you got close enough for its decibels to drown out all the other decibels around it, like microclimates of sound. I moved from Snoop Dog to the Beastie Boys to the Doors doing “L.A. Woman.”

  I stopped there and pushed up against two couples, both easily in their sixties. The tallest of the bunch sported a belly that made him look sixteen months pregnant. I wondered if his back hurt.

  “Nice car,” I said, which was about all I knew to say. I’d bought the Corvette in a manic fit a few years before after not getting off the couch for a week.

  “Thank you.” His voice was deep, not Barry White deep but well into baritone range. He had a silver beard and would’ve made a good Santa Claus. “’56,” he told me, nodding toward the open hood with his chin.

  The engine shone in the overhead parking lot lights as if someone had rubbed it with a cloth diaper. I wondered if he ever drove it.

  “My dad had a ’56 T-Bird,” I said. “He used to cruise here back in the seventies.”

  His woman, who had short curls clipped tight to her head, smiled. “Oh yeah.”

  “Some of these boys date from then,” Santa Claus agreed. “Not me. Bertha, here, cruised it, though. That woulda been with her first husband.”

  Bertha was all agreement. “Oh yeah.”

  “He was in a club,” I said. “Might have been the Pumas.”

  “Sorry, sugar,” he told me. “I was back in Arizona up until ’85.”

  I looked at Bertha for a little help, but she was all out of agreement. I smiled and nodded and moved on.

  At the end of the row, I passed a cluster of choppers, got a couple of approving looks, and made a one-eighty down the next line of showpieces. I passed up anything that looked newer than the 1960s and got my crotch sniffed by a docile, light-gray pit bull while waiting for a Stingray to pull out.

  I stopped at a Mustang and two Corvettes much nicer than mine but didn’t get any further than I had with
Kris Kringle. No one had heard of the Pumas, and while everybody agreed a canary yellow ’56 T-Bird was a sweet ride, nobody, not even the guys who had cruised back in the day, remembered one. Although one guy wanted to know if it was all stock, and if so, where my father sourced his parts. I told him if I ever found the man, I’d ask.

  I was close to giving up, close to freezing to death, and close to losing my hearing by the time I’d snaked down the second row. But in the last spot next to the exit sat what I’d have called a station wagon except it looked like it had been made before they were called that. It wasn’t a van, but the long back section of the cab was closed in with panels instead of windows. The front end was long, too, with big rolled wheel wells that came up as high as the hood. It was painted cherry red with orange and yellow flames coming off the grill. The man standing beside it wore a palm-tree–festooned Hawaiian shirt over khaki shorts with white knee socks and an old-fashioned driving cap on backward. Nothing is impossible in L.A., but the two children at his side—a boy and a girl in matching sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up—were young enough that I was going to guess it was grandpa’s night out with the tykes. And not a single one of those things was the most interesting part. The most interesting part was a sticker on the lower passenger side of the windshield that said “BobCats.”

  I had to wait for a break in the line of cars inching out onto the street before darting across. He saw me coming and didn’t look like he knew what to think about that. I tried to be less enthusiastic, less hopeful, just generally less, and to keep it away from the kids in case he got jumpy.

  “Is that the name of your car club?” I asked, pointing at the sticker.

  “Yeah.” He said it like you say it when the phone rings during campaign season and someone who mispronounces your name asks if you’re home.

  “Were you guys around in the late seventies? Like 1978, maybe?”

  He relaxed a little, and the kids started to lose interest in me and went back to trying to scrape petrified gum off the asphalt with the heels of their tennis shoes.

  “Oh yeah. We’re one of the oldest clubs out here. Not many hung together from the old days. But we kept doing shows and stuff even when they closed the boulevard down.”

  “My dad was a member back then.”

  His shoulders dropped the last few inches, and we were friends. “Yeah? What was his name?”

  “Jerry Pritchard.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. Don’t remember him. It was a long time ago.”

  “He was an accountant,” I pushed. “Worked at Parker, Combs, and Jimenez back when it was just Parker and Combs.”

  “Sorry,” he said again.

  “He had a ’56 T-Bird. It was yellow.”

  His face cracked open, and he pointed at me like Uncle Sam in a recruitment poster. “Now that I remember. What did you say his name was again?”

  “Jerry Pritchard.”

  “Guess my memory just isn’t what it used to be. Then again, I never was good with names. How’s he doing?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.” I gave him the whitewashed version of my story.

  “Too bad, kid. Well, I hope you find him. Wish I could tell you something, but it’s that hot rod I remember more than anything. It’s too bad he sold it, too.”

  My guts came loose from their moorings and sank into my lower intestines. My only lead was about to be severed.

  “He sold it?”

  “Sure did. I remember cause there wasn’t one of us guys didn’t want to buy it. He wanted a lot, though. Too rich for my blood. You should’ve seen the interior. It was that old-fashioned sea foam green they used to use. I think that’s probably the color the paint used to be, too, but he kept it yellow. Went good with the green, I guess, but I’d have painted it back to the way it was.”

  “Why’d he sell it? Do you know?”

  “Said he was going out of state. Didn’t want to take it with him.”

  18 Days

  I rolled off the bed and fell two and a half feet to the floor sometime after 8 A.M. but before 9. I’m not sure if I did it on purpose or not, but when I landed, my elbow jammed into my ribs and my head bounced a little off the hardwood floor. It didn’t hurt as much as you would think. I landed on my left side facing the gap under my bed. There were boxes under there I’d never unpacked after leaving Richard. The corners had collected so much gray dust it looked like fur, and the cardboard was sagging and going soft like we all do with age.

  I felt the light change through the day as much as I saw it. I felt the sun come through the open window and felt it move across my feet, warming them, and then up to my ankles and my calves before the bed blocked it from going any farther, and then the earth turned some more and the rays no longer came straight through the window. I kept lying there with my elbow in my ribs and my head on the boards looking at the furry boxes. It got brighter and then darker and then quite dark staring under there. I had to pee, but I pretended I didn’t. I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. I didn’t want to be anything at all. I didn’t want to exist.

  I didn’t think I could go another eighteen days. Eighteen days seemed an interminable period of time.

  This was how I found my sister.

  She was lying on her side in her bedroom. She was farther away from the bed, though. Closer to the center of the room. She was sticky and wet like I was; although I was wet, I realized, because sometime during the day I’d peed myself. Ramona had bled out.

  There is no such thing as instant death. Not unless the bullet severs the brain stem. Doctors and police officers tell families that story because otherwise they have to tell them the truth, which is that you lie there in the process of dying and in horrible pain while your heart keeps beating and your nerves keep feeling and your brain keeps spinning until your circulatory system spews out all the blood it can, and there’s no more oxygen to get to your brain. Then you die. It takes a while. I learned that in a high school health class. An EMT had come to give a lecture. Ramona and my mother had been dead for two years then. For two years, I’d believed their deaths had been instant and painless.

  They had not been.

  I had sat glued to my seat, the kind with the chair and the desk all in one piece, while the EMT talked. I’d thought I might vomit. I didn’t, but I didn’t go to my next class, either. I asked to go to the school nurse, who let me lie on the vinyl examining bed with a cool washcloth over my eyes. I told her I had a migraine.

  Ramona had had a cold. It wasn’t a bad cold, but it wasn’t a fake cold, either. And she had been staying home from school for two days. She was old enough to stay home by herself and not so sick that she couldn’t. On the first day, my mother had gone to work and left Ramona with some cough syrup and some sandwiches and the television. On the second day, she stayed home, too. She was having a “black day.” That’s what she called them, her sad days. Mostly she stayed in bed on black days. I would make our lunches and our dinners and see that Ramona’s and my teeth got brushed.

  I packed my own lunch that day and went to school. Sometime after 10 A.M., our mother went into Ramona’s room with her father’s pistol. He’d left it to her in his will because she was the oldest child. She shot my sister twice. One bullet went through Ramona’s chest, right where her small left boob was. The second shot went through her stomach.

  Then Mom went into her bedroom, sat down in the small foufou chair that made up half of her vanity set, and shot herself in the head. She put the gun in her mouth and angled it up a bit, so the power of the blast ripped her cheeks open and blew out the back of her skull. She probably died a lot quicker than Ramona. She was probably already gone while my sister was still beating and feeling and spinning, but pretty soon Ramona died, too.

  I found them both at three-thirty when I came home from school. The blood was dark and congealed by then. I thought a mugger or a rapist or a hobo had done it and went screaming out of the house to the neighbor across the street. I didn’t look for cars and
was almost plowed down by a Plymouth.

  That night I went to stay with Aunt Trudy and never went back inside the house again. I wonder sometimes what it would’ve been like if I had known when I was running out that I would never, ever again cross that threshold or see those things or breathe that air. I wonder what I was doing when my mother shot my sister. I know I was in algebra class, and we were having a quiz. Which problem exactly was I doing when the bullet left the barrel? When Ramona finally pumped out the last of her blood and her oxygen? Did I get that problem right?

  I didn’t go back to class for a month, and I eventually changed schools. Someone went and got my books and my work from the teachers. I like to think it was Bob, but I don’t remember. It’s like someone cut the film of my memory from the time the police came until weeks and weeks later. I was in suspended animation, except I’m pretty sure it was painful. Like now. It probably felt a little like now.

  I was almost twenty before I started having black days, too.

  It had gotten dark in my apartment. I couldn’t see the boxes or the dust. Chuckles had come and gone a few times. Once he’d meowed. I hadn’t fed him, and he was hungry. Now he came back and sniffed my foot. I hoped he wouldn’t eat my face off. I’d heard that could happen even if you were alive—if the animal was hungry enough and you were trapped and couldn’t get away, like maybe you’d had a stroke and were paralyzed.

  This was like a stroke. I stayed where I was with my elbow in my ribs; although, I couldn’t feel either of them anymore. Chuckles went away, and I must’ve fallen asleep.

  17 Days

  I threw the clothes from the day before in the Dumpster. I showered and put on fresh work clothes, which meant they were covered in glue and paint and smelled of solvents but had nonetheless been through a complete wash and dry cycle and were, therefore, considered clean.

  I found some men and women in a National Geographic who had the walnut-colored skin I wanted. Some darker, some brighter. Highlights and lowlights that from a distance made up the movement of muscle. I cut pieces of them out with my X-Acto knife, and I applied them to the back of the buffalo on the canvas. If I had time, I thought I might do a whole series of animals.